User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo clean team

The Guantanamo clean team was an attempt to obtain information from Guantanamo captives who had been subjected to torture, that would be admissable when they faced charges before Guantanamo military commissions.

The original military commissions were initiated under the authority by United States President George W. Bush in 2004. The rules allowed the use of confessions and denunciations extracted under torture. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Hamdan v. Bush that the United States President lacked the constitutional authority to set up military commissions. It ruled that only the United States Congress had the authority to set up military commissions.

In 2006 the Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and in 2009 it passed the Military Commissions Act of 2009. Human rights workers and some legal scholars continue to question the fairness of the newer commissions, but they did tighten the rules, making it harder to use confessions and denunciations extracted under torture.

Prosecutors thought they could get around the difficulty that their initial proscution plans relied on information extracted under torture if they started all over again, with a new team of interrogators, interrogators who did not use torture. They argued that information the suspects revealed to the new team could be used.